Christ’s Standard of Salvation & Discipleship for His Kingdom | Part E

The King James Version (KJV) is mostly used in these lessons. Click here to access the KJV online.

Salvation Involves Our Choice

We have to cooperate with Yahuwah for our salvation. We cannot pass the buck and make Yahuwah and Yahushua entirely and exclusively responsible for our salvation. Otherwise why does Yahuwah address the human race by telling us to “choose”? If Yahuwah has already made an irrevocably predestined choice for us, He is playing verbal games with us. No, He instructs us to “choose life” rather than death (Deut. 30:19). Why would anyone choose death when he or she can choose to live, by listening and obeying Yahuwah’s Agent, the Lord Messiah? “Work out your own salvation,” comes the apostolic cry to us (Phil. 2:12). Yahuwah will help you indeed as He works with you and you with Him.

Ought not Yahushua to have said to the young nobleman, “No points in inquiring about eternal life, for you are not predestined for it”? Or he might have said, “You have no need to inquire, because you are already predestined to eternal life.” He gave neither answer, but invited the nobleman to make the responsible choice. Harmony between the “predestination” and “free grace” controversy is easily resolved. We choose our destiny and Yahuwah works with us to secure a successful outcome. All who want to come may come. Yahuwah wants all to be saved. The only way to come successfully is to yield to the attractive power of the Gospel of the Kingdom as preached by Yahushua and Paul (see Acts 8:12; 19:8; 20:24, 25; 28:23, 31). There is no way to Yahuwah except through Yahushua and his Gospel. The Plan has been predetermined. It is our wisdom to get in line with the Plan and surrender our wills to it. The grace of Yahuwah comes to us in His gracious Gospel of salvation in the coming Kingdom. We must make the choice to accept the terms of salvation.

Yes, the less sophisticated or talented sometimes do a better job of receiving the Gospel. “Yahuwah has chosen the foolish things of the world to shame the wise, and Yahuwah has chosen the weak things of the world to shame the things which are strong, and the base things of the world and the despised Yahuwah has chosen, the things that are not, so that He may nullify the things that are, so that no man may boast before Yahuwah” (1 Cor. 1:27-29).

Once started, the race towards the Kingdom of Yahuwah is on and “through much tribulation we are destined to enter the Kingdom” (Acts 14:22). In Philippians 3:13, 14 Paul lays out the challenge to believers: “Brothers and sisters, I do not reckon myself to have reached the goal: but this one thing I do...I press toward the mark for the prize of the high calling of Yahuwah in Christ Yahushua.” Paul wants to “know him, and the power of his resurrection, and the fellowship of his sufferings, being conformed to his death; if by any means I might attain to the resurrection of the dead” (Phil. 3:10, 11). It hardly sounds as if it is all inevitable in some fixed decree. Paul must struggle to endure to the end.

The idea of an unconditional (the condition is repentance and believing the Gospel) acceptance of sinners by Yahuwah both before they accept Christ, but also after they are converted, no matter how persistently they might continue in sin, constitutes a grave peril. It causes a false sense of security and can amount to carelessness about sin. If I am saved, say some, by an eternal decree that prevents me from ever falling away, why should I be bothered with striving for the prize? Peter knew nothing of a Calvinistic predeterminism. We are given “exceedingly great and precious promises, that by these you might partake of the divine nature, having escaped the corruption which is in the world through lust” (2 Pet. 1:4). “My brothers, take all the more care to make your selection and approval certain; for if you do these things you will never fall” (2 Pet. 1:10). There is no trouble-free Christianity, nor a belief in an inevitable success, no matter what.